Enterprise software is generally used to manage the inventory, transactions, customer relationship, manufacturing, purchases, sales, services, and finance of a business. Enterprise software often stores business data in a business database, e.g., a company's proprietary database. To obtain information from the database, a user often conducts a search in the database.
Conventional business databases often store information based on a pre-determined classification of the information. If a user's search term is not in one of the pre-determined classifications, either no result will be produced at all, or a result will be produced after several search steps. For example, FIG. 1 shows the operations of a command center 150 of a conventional business database. In FIG. 1, an end user wishes to obtain the stock status of a product item A0001 purchased from vendor V0001. In operation 11, the user first locates “Stock Status” from a menu provided by a user interface of command center 150. In operation 12, the user clicks on the “Stock Status” in a menu. In response to the clicking, in operation 13, command center 150 opens a display window in the user interface to provide a plurality of selection criteria. In operation 14, the user enters product item code “A0001” to specify the product of interest. In operation 15, the user enters supplier code “V0001” to specify the vendor of interest. In operation 16, the user clicks on an “OK” button to run report. In operation 18, command center 150 generates a stock status report. In operation 19, the user prints the report. In operation 20, the user finishes the task and closes the search program.
In the above example, multiple user operations are typically needed in order for the command center to gather all the information necessary for the report. Thus, the conventional database search tool is generally inefficient for business purposes. Moreover, the information necessary for the report is often stored under several different directories in different locations. Thus, the search and retrieval of the information are also inefficient for business purposes.